PhD, Critical Studies & Experimental Practices in Music,
University of California-San Diego;MA, Music, University of
California-San Diego;BA, Music, Eastman School of Music/University of
Rochester

Associate Professor of Music

Profile:

As a
musician I strive to balance the pleasures of making music with the rigors of
thinking about it (or do I mean the pleasures of thinking about it and the
rigors of making it?). The piano is my instrument but I enjoy many kinds of
music, especially because they can all lead to rich discoveries about the world
and about one’s self. As an undergraduate I studied piano at the Eastman School
of Music and in Vienna on my junior year abroad, then at the Liszt Academy in
Budapest on a Fulbright scholarship. For graduate studies I focused on
contemporary and avant-garde music and performance, and received my PhD from the
University of California-San Diego.

Before joining the Lang Arts
faculty in 2003, I taught at the University of South Carolina School of Music
and then at Whitman College, a liberal arts college in Washington State. Both of
those teaching experiences positively shaped my approach to critical pedagogy
and curriculum development at Lang. At South Carolina my students were music
majors in instrumental and vocal performance; at Whitman I taught in the Core
Curriculum, an overview of the great texts of Antiquity and Modernity for
first-year students of widely-varied academic goals. My own undergraduate career
took me from the narrow focus of a music conservatory curriculum to a broader
liberal arts education at the University of Rochester while I still continued my
studies and performing at Eastman. So I’m a strong advocate for a well-rounded
education that focuses on the arts as well as their place in the larger contexts
of history and culture. That’s why arriving at Lang College to teach in the
interdisciplinary Arts in Context program was exactly what I had always wanted
to do.

My scholarly work focuses on the cultural meanings of musical performance in relation to various social ideologies and forms of technology. I co-edited a defining collection of essays about the politics and poetics of the Eurovision Song Contest, the world’s largest and longest-running annual televised competition for popular music. My new book, titled Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist, is a wide-ranging study of the concert pianist as a popular cultural icon, focusing on the role of technology in producing and perpetuating the mythology of the pianist’s romantic allure over the past two centuries. Visual music is another research focus area for me, especially as it relates to modes of sensory perception, or perceptual practices, which inform visual and musical creativity. In 2013 I was a Fulbright Visiting Professor in the University of Vienna’s Department of Musicology, where I researched Oskar Rainer’s musical graphics movement and lectured on the topic of visual music. Twenty-five years before I had been a student in Vienna on my junior year abroad, so it was an amazing experience to return again, this time to teach.

Courses Taught:

Arts in New York CityFundamentals of Western MusicHistory and Culture of the PianoMusical BorrowingMusic in FilmMusic, Taste & ValuesVisual Music